DisastersObama says Arizona wildfire deaths open up broader questions

Obama calls for fire services to review their policies // Source: vietbao.vn

President Barack Obama said on Monday that several states need to reassess their wildfire management policies in the aftermath of the death of the nineteen firefighters who died battling an Arizona blaze.

“I think we are going to have to ask ourselves a set of broader questions about how we are handling increasingly deadly and difficult firefights,” Obama said Monday during a press conference in Tanzania.

“Wildfires have been continually escalating at higher and higher cost, and putting more and more pressure not only on the federal fire services but also on state and local fire services, and we are going to have to think about what more we can do on that front.

“But for now, I think what we are most concerned about are how painful these losses are,” added Obama, who is on an eight-day, multi-nation tour through Africa.

TheHill reports that Obama did not mention climate change in his remarks on the wildfires, but that his administration has used this year’s wildfires as the context for presenting the administration’s climate initiatives to battle global warming and the extreme weather which it creates. The climate plan the White House released last week said that wildfires are getting more frequent and more intense due to heat and drought linked by climate change.

Last year alone wildfires have burned through 9.3 million acres in the United States, the third highest total on record.

Obama also said that his administration will help with the investigation into the deaths of the firefighters, who were members of the elite Granite Mountain Hotshots, who were battling a blaze eighty miles northwest of Phoenix.